[h=1]HILLARY CLINTON’S LAUNDRY LIST OF LIES[/h]written by Don Anastas
[h=2]UPDATE: With Hillary Clinton announcing her candidacy for POTUS in 2016 I will be updating more and more with links to significant articles concerning the “Corrupt Clinton Machine”. All links can be found at the bottom of this post.[/h]My original article was first posted December 11, 2007.
More than lies actually, many things bordering on criminal, somethings very possible criminal.
“Rules for Radicals” by self-described Communist, Saul Alinsky, is a reminder that Hillary Clinton was a friend of Alinsky, and his pen-pal. Known as the “Hillary Letters”, which you can read here, then Hillary Rodham met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing. The letters also suggest that Alinsky, who died in 1972, had a deeper influence on Clinton’s early political views than previously known.
A 23-year-old Hillary Clinton was living in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1971. She was interning at the left-wing law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, known for its radical politics and a client roster that included Black Panthers and other militants.
On July 8, 1971, Clinton reached out to Alinsky, then 62, in a letter sent via airmail, paid for with stamps featuring Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and marked “Personal.”
“Dear Saul,” she began. “When is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out—or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?”
“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she added, a reference to Alinsky’s 1946 book on his theories of community organizing.
National Journal legal columnist, Stuart Taylor Jr., offers a list of a long list of questionable statements made by Hillary Clinton during the Clinton scandals of the 1990s.“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she added, a reference to Alinsky’s 1946 book on his theories of community organizing.
Mr. Stuart asks, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?”
Read more on the Hillary Letters at Free Beacon.
Let’s take a careful look at more on Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Gennifer and Monica. Former lounge singer Gennifer Flowers surfaced in early 1992 with claims — corroborated by tapes of phone calls — that she had had a long affair with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had arranged a state job for her. Bill Clinton told the media, falsely, that the woman’s “story is untrue.”
Although well aware of her husband’s philandering history, Hillary backed his squishy denials, famously asserting on “60 Minutes” that she was not “some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette.”
Travelgate. The first Clinton scandal after Bill became president started in May 1993, when Chief of Staff Mack McLarty fired the seven employees in the White House office that arranges travel for the press corps. The White House cited gross financial mismanagement.
Hillary later told the General Accounting Office, in a document prepared by her attorney, that she had no role in the decision to fire the employees, did not know the “origin of the decision,” and “did not direct that any action be taken by anyone” other than keeping her informed.
Cattle futures. The New York Times revealed in March 1994 that in 1978, just before her husband became governor, Hillary had made a $100,000 profit on a $1,000 investment in highly speculative cattle-futures contracts in only nine months. Hillary’s first explanation (through aides) of this extraordinary windfall was that she had made the investment after “readingThe Wall Street Journal” and placed all the trades herself after seeking advice from “numerous people.”
Eventually, she had to admit that longtime Clinton friend James Blair had executed 30 of her 32 trades directly with an Arkansas broker. In an April 1994 press conference, Hillary denied knowing of “any favorable treatment” by Blair.
Removal of Vince Foster documents. During the same press conference, Hillary was asked why her then-chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had been involved in removing documents from the office of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster after his suicide.
“I don’t know that she did remove any documents,” Hillary said. But it was reported three months later that Hillary had instructed Williams to remove the Foster documents to the White House residence.
Castle Grande. In the summer of 1995, the Resolution Trust Corp. reported that Hillary had been one of 11 Rose Law Firm lawyers who had done work in the mid-1980s on an Arkansas real estate development, widely known as Castle Grande, promoted by James McDougal and Seth Ward.
McDougal headed a troubled thrift, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and had given Hillary legal business as a favor to Bill. McDougal and his wife, Susan, were the Clintons’ partners in their Whitewater real estate investment.
Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to “deceive federal bank examiners.”
Later, Hubbell went to prison for fraud, as did James McDougal.
Billing records. Hillary’s billing records for Castle Grande were in a 116-page, 5-inch-thick computer printout that came to light under mysterious circumstances on January 4, 1996 — 19 months after Starr’s investigators had subpoenaed it and amid prosecutorial pressure on Clinton aides who had been strikingly forgetful. For most of that time, Hillary claimed that the billing records had vanished.
This implausible tale, on top of other deceptions, prompted New York Times columnist William Safire to write on January 8, 1996, that “our first lady … is a congenital liar.”
The next day, the White House press secretary said that the president wanted to punch Safire in the nose for insulting his wife. Five days later, the president invited Monica Lewinsky to the Oval Office for what turned out to be one of their 10 oral-sex sessions.
Two years and 13 days after that, Hillary was on the “Today” show suggesting that her husband’s Lewinsky affair was a lie concocted by “this vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Hmmmmmmm….Conspiracy Indeed!
[h=3]Hillary Lies and Obfuscations from Debate #1 Oct. 13/2015[/h]“I have spent a very long time – my entire adult life – looking for ways…to find the ways for each child to live up to his or her God-given potential.”
“Yes, finally, fathers will be able to say to their daughters, you, too, can grow up to be president.”
“Actually, I have been very consistent.”
“I did say, when I was secretary of state, three years ago, that I hoped it would be the gold standard. It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn’t meet my standards.”
“I’m a progressive. But I’m a progressive who likes to get things done…how to find common ground, and I have proved that in every position that I’ve had, even dealing with Republicans who never had a good word to say about me, honestly.”
“When I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started…”
“It was pretty straightforward to me that [Sanders] was going to give immunity to the only industry in America. Everybody else has to be accountable, but not the gun manufacturers.”
“Well first of all, we got a lot of business done with the Russians when Medvedev was the president, and not Putin….There’s no doubt that when Putin came back in and said he was going to be President, that did change the relationship.”
“I think while you’re talking about the tough decision that President Obama had to make about Osama bin Laden, where I was one of his few advisers, or putting together that coalition to impose sanctions on Iran…”
“We had a murderous dictator, Gadhafi, who had American blood on his hands, as I’m sure you remember, threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people… Our response, which I think was smart power at its best, is that the United States will not lead this.”
“I’ll get to that.” (Concerning Benghazi)
“The Libyan people had a free election the first time since 1951. And you know what, they voted for moderates, they voted with the hope of democracy.”
“I think it has to be continued threat from the spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear material that can fall into the wrong hands. I know the terrorists are constantly seeking it, and that’s why we have to stay vigilant, but also united around the world to prevent that.”
“Well, I’ve taken responsibility for it. I did say it was a mistake. What I did was allowed by the State Department, but it wasn’t the best choice. And I have been as transparent as I know to be, turning over 55,000 pages of my e-mails, asking that they be made public. And you’re right. I am going to be testifying. I’ve been asking to testify for some time and to do it in public, which was not originally agreed to.”
“I want to make sure every single person in this country has the same opportunities that he and I have had, to make the most of their God-given potential and to have the chances that they should have in America for a good education, good job training, and then good jobs.”
“This inequality challenge we face, we have faced it at other points. It’s absolutely right. It hasn’t been this bad since the 1920s. But if you look at the Republicans versus the Democrats when it comes to economic policy, there is no comparison. The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House and that’s why we need to have a Democrat in the White House in January 2017.”
“We have to deal with the problem that the banks are still too big to fail. We can never let the American taxpayer and middle class families ever have to bail out the kind of speculative behavior that we saw.”
“I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 — before the big crash that we had — and I basically said, ‘Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.’”
“I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.”
“I have been on the forefront of dealing with climate change, starting in 2009, when President Obama and I crashed (ph) a meeting with the Chinese and got them to sign up to the first international agreement to combat climate change that they’d ever joined.”
“My plan would enable anyone to go to a public college or university tuition free.”
“I think that it was necessary to make sure that we were able after 9/11 to put in place the security that we needed. And it is true that it did require that there be a process. What happened, however, is that the Bush administration began to chip away at that process. And I began to speak out about their use of warrantless surveillance and the other behavior that they engaged in.”
“Well, I can’t think of anything more of an outsider than electing the first woman president, but I’m not just running because I would be the first woman president….Well, I would not ask anyone to vote for me based on my last name.”
“California has had a paid leave program for a number of years….And it has not had the ill effects that the Republicans are always saying it will have.”
“They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. They’re fine with big government when it comes to that. I’m sick of it.”
“I know we can afford it, because we’re going to make the wealthy pay for it. That is the way to get it done.”
“Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians.”
[h=2]The 7 Wildest Lies From Hillary Clinton[/h]
RustyContributor
Normally, we’d like to focus on positive thoughts around the holiday season. But with Hillary Clinton very recently using the tragedy of 9/11 to justify her ties to Wall Street, especially when those ties were well-establishedbefore that day, we found it necessary to analyze some other lies told by the presidential hopeful.
Sure, paring down Clinton’s resume of lies and exaggerations is no easy task, but we decided to go with 7 to match the number of deadly sins, many of which the Clinton family is guilty of as well.
To get you in the mood for the following list, we asked rock legend Henry Rollins to share his thoughts on Mrs. Clinton. As a result, he wrote this song …
Okay, maybe not, but it certainly sets the tone for this list.
Anyway, away we go …
Read more: http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/t-day-evergreen-7-wildest-lies-hillary-clinton/#ixzz44bXlYX8i
RustyContributor
Normally, we’d like to focus on positive thoughts around the holiday season. But with Hillary Clinton very recently using the tragedy of 9/11 to justify her ties to Wall Street, especially when those ties were well-establishedbefore that day, we found it necessary to analyze some other lies told by the presidential hopeful.
Sure, paring down Clinton’s resume of lies and exaggerations is no easy task, but we decided to go with 7 to match the number of deadly sins, many of which the Clinton family is guilty of as well.
To get you in the mood for the following list, we asked rock legend Henry Rollins to share his thoughts on Mrs. Clinton. As a result, he wrote this song …
Okay, maybe not, but it certainly sets the tone for this list.
Anyway, away we go …
- Dead Broke – In an interview, Clinton stated that she “came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.” Something even the left-leaning Politifact found to be false.
- Sniper Fire – During the 2008 campaign, Clinton said she came under sniper fire in Bosnia during the ’90s. She went so far as to claim her group ran “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” Video of her actual arrival surfaced showing a very calm scene instead, and the Democrat would quickly say she simply misspoke.
- Immigrant Grandparents – When discussing immigrant stories, Clinton asserted that “all my grandparents… came over here.” It was another story Politifact said was false, as only one of her grandparents was an immigrant.
- Sir Edmund Hillary – Seems Clinton can’t even bring herself to tell the truth about her own name. She claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first men to climb Mt. Everest. One small problem though, the explorer didn’t climb Everest until Clinton was 6 years old.
- The Few, The Proud, The Marines – Very recently, Clinton claimed to have been turned down by the Marines when she applied in 1975. Washington Post fact-checkers quickly realized the absurdity that a rising legal star at the time, and soon to be wife of Bill Clinton, would drop everything and ship off with the Marines. They gave her a couple of Pinocchios for her tall tale.
- Secret E-Mails – Former Secretary of State Clinton claimed her infamous private e-mail server was set up in “accordance with the rules and the regulations in effect.” A federal judge disagreed, saying Clinton“violated government policy” when she used a private server to store official State Department messages.
- Benghazi – Clearly the most reprehensible lie of them all – Clinton failed to tell the truth about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi. She claimed for weeks, standing over the flag-draped coffins of murdered Americans, that an insensitive YouTube video had incited the violence that occurred that night. Why? Because a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11 – which it was – would have destroyed President Obama’s re-election chances. But hey, at the end of the day it’s worth it to Clinton to tell a politically expedient lie, so long as her party can stay in power.
Read more: http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/t-day-evergreen-7-wildest-lies-hillary-clinton/#ixzz44bXlYX8i
Russ…
Of the 7 I find this the most stupid, foolish, brainless, mindless, senseless, idiotic, imbecilic, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, nonsensical, fatuous, silly, inane, witless, empty-headed.
Sir Edmund Hillary – Seems Clinton can’t even bring herself to tell the truth about her own name. She claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first men to climb Mt. Everest. One small problem though, the explorer didn’t climb Everest until Clinton was 6 years old.
How fucking dumb to you have to be to come up with something like that?
Of the 7 I find this the most stupid, foolish, brainless, mindless, senseless, idiotic, imbecilic, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, nonsensical, fatuous, silly, inane, witless, empty-headed.
Sir Edmund Hillary – Seems Clinton can’t even bring herself to tell the truth about her own name. She claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first men to climb Mt. Everest. One small problem though, the explorer didn’t climb Everest until Clinton was 6 years old.
How fucking dumb to you have to be to come up with something like that?
Hillary to Bernie fans: Be good now, and hush
By John Kass
Published April 1, 2016
Hush, young Bernie Sanders supporters. Shhh.
Hillary Clinton's campaign wants you to change your tone. And when you've changed it, tone it down.
I don't mind you making noise. But Clinton's advisers don't like it, and they talk as if you're still in those pajamas with the feet. The message?
Be still. Good night. Hush. Go to sleep.
And there's Hillary herself in that comfy chair in the dark, right out of "Goodnight Moon," that family bedtime story by Margaret Wise Brown that you may remember from childhood.
You know the room, that big green room with the red balloon. The picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And the comb and the brush and the bowlful of mush.
And the old lady whispering, "hush."
So why would Hillary whisper "hush" to young people feeling the Bern?
Because she wants to be president of the United States and rule the world, and fulfill her destiny as queen of the new American political establishment.
And she doesn't need Sanders supporters ruining things.
Which is why her campaign has been working so hard to get Sanders voters to simmer down.
Sanders is the candidate with the momentum on the Democratic side. His voters believe that he believes in something. And I think he does. I disagree with his views, but he does stand for something.
And Hillary Clinton? What does she stand for? What does she believe in?
Herself. Power. That's about it.
She's like Frank Underwood in pantsuits.
She'll play the gender card, she'll pander to race, she'll force you to parse her sentences. These are tactics, not core principles.
But she is the candidate with establishment support, with her Wall Street friends and those neoconservative war hawks leaving the Republicans and rushing up to her for great big hugs.
And though Sanders wants to debate her in New York, the Clinton campaign has explained the rules of silence.
"Sen. Sanders doesn't get to decide when we debate, particularly when he's running a very negative campaign against us," complained chief strategist Joel Benenson on CNN. "Let's see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we'll talk about debates."
She's apparently agreed to a debate. We'll see. But whether there's another debate or not, you can learn about a candidate from the demands of her campaign.
And if she's this way now when she needs votes, what will she be like when she's queen of the world? Will you be as quiet as a bowlful of mush?
For weeks now, liberal pundits and Democratic senators have been telling Sanders voters to hush, to give up Bernie, just close your eyes, roll over and join Team Hillary.
They whisper in the voice of reason in the dark -- the way all establishment whispers begin -- saying that for the sake of party unity, just dump Bernie. Then you may curl up in Hillary's lap for a bedtime story.
It's exactly the same tone that Republican establishment leaders and their mouthpieces offered to GOP conservatives years ago. It's all about how unity is strength, and only when we're unified can we hope to defeat those terrible enemies just waiting to take away our precious things.
What you may come to realize is that establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are quite similar. They're the two horns on the head of the same goat. But don't think about this now. You'll never get to sleep.
There is something that may make you shut your eyes. It's that monster hiding under your bed: Donald Trump.
Trump is the bogeyman now. And if you insist on staying awake, Hillary would like you to focus on The Donald.
Trump says crazy things, so crazy lately that I wonder if he really wants to be president, or if the pressure has finally gotten to him. He allows stupidity to whoosh past his lips almost daily now. Perhaps he just wants out of the campaign.
Trump's latest crazy thing was saying that if abortions are banned, women who have abortions will be punished. And that drove everyone else insane -- Bernie, Hillary, conservative Ted Cruz, journalists, opinionators, everyone.
Trump later backed off on his statement. And, of course, it won't happen. Abortion is not going to be outlawed. America has become used to it now. It's not changing.
So worrying about an impending abortion ban and Trump's punishment is as realistic as worrying about Raul Castro sending his armies to occupy Wall Street.
But a bipartisan public freakout over a crazy man saying crazy things is sometimes entertaining, and Trump's nonsense helps us forget the monster hiding under Clinton's own bed:
The FBI.
Her top aides from her time as secretary of state may soon be questioned by FBI agents investigating how top secret and other classified documents came to be kept on her private server. And after they're questioned, it will be her turn.
There's no assurance that her private server wasn't hacked by foreign intelligence. At issue was whether she was merely negligent or willful, and either puts her in real legal and political jeopardy.
And so what she needs is for Democrats to have nightmares about Trump, the better to ignore whether their leading candidate may very well be implicated in a criminal probe. And with so much stress on her, we might as well put Hillary back on the comfy chair in the quiet room:
"Goodnight comb and goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.
"And goodnight to the old lady whispering, 'hush.'"
By John Kass
Published April 1, 2016
Hush, young Bernie Sanders supporters. Shhh.
Hillary Clinton's campaign wants you to change your tone. And when you've changed it, tone it down.
I don't mind you making noise. But Clinton's advisers don't like it, and they talk as if you're still in those pajamas with the feet. The message?
Be still. Good night. Hush. Go to sleep.
And there's Hillary herself in that comfy chair in the dark, right out of "Goodnight Moon," that family bedtime story by Margaret Wise Brown that you may remember from childhood.
You know the room, that big green room with the red balloon. The picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And the comb and the brush and the bowlful of mush.
And the old lady whispering, "hush."
So why would Hillary whisper "hush" to young people feeling the Bern?
Because she wants to be president of the United States and rule the world, and fulfill her destiny as queen of the new American political establishment.
And she doesn't need Sanders supporters ruining things.
Which is why her campaign has been working so hard to get Sanders voters to simmer down.
Sanders is the candidate with the momentum on the Democratic side. His voters believe that he believes in something. And I think he does. I disagree with his views, but he does stand for something.
And Hillary Clinton? What does she stand for? What does she believe in?
Herself. Power. That's about it.
She's like Frank Underwood in pantsuits.
She'll play the gender card, she'll pander to race, she'll force you to parse her sentences. These are tactics, not core principles.
But she is the candidate with establishment support, with her Wall Street friends and those neoconservative war hawks leaving the Republicans and rushing up to her for great big hugs.
And though Sanders wants to debate her in New York, the Clinton campaign has explained the rules of silence.
"Sen. Sanders doesn't get to decide when we debate, particularly when he's running a very negative campaign against us," complained chief strategist Joel Benenson on CNN. "Let's see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we'll talk about debates."
She's apparently agreed to a debate. We'll see. But whether there's another debate or not, you can learn about a candidate from the demands of her campaign.
And if she's this way now when she needs votes, what will she be like when she's queen of the world? Will you be as quiet as a bowlful of mush?
For weeks now, liberal pundits and Democratic senators have been telling Sanders voters to hush, to give up Bernie, just close your eyes, roll over and join Team Hillary.
They whisper in the voice of reason in the dark -- the way all establishment whispers begin -- saying that for the sake of party unity, just dump Bernie. Then you may curl up in Hillary's lap for a bedtime story.
It's exactly the same tone that Republican establishment leaders and their mouthpieces offered to GOP conservatives years ago. It's all about how unity is strength, and only when we're unified can we hope to defeat those terrible enemies just waiting to take away our precious things.
What you may come to realize is that establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are quite similar. They're the two horns on the head of the same goat. But don't think about this now. You'll never get to sleep.
There is something that may make you shut your eyes. It's that monster hiding under your bed: Donald Trump.
Trump is the bogeyman now. And if you insist on staying awake, Hillary would like you to focus on The Donald.
Trump says crazy things, so crazy lately that I wonder if he really wants to be president, or if the pressure has finally gotten to him. He allows stupidity to whoosh past his lips almost daily now. Perhaps he just wants out of the campaign.
Trump's latest crazy thing was saying that if abortions are banned, women who have abortions will be punished. And that drove everyone else insane -- Bernie, Hillary, conservative Ted Cruz, journalists, opinionators, everyone.
Trump later backed off on his statement. And, of course, it won't happen. Abortion is not going to be outlawed. America has become used to it now. It's not changing.
So worrying about an impending abortion ban and Trump's punishment is as realistic as worrying about Raul Castro sending his armies to occupy Wall Street.
But a bipartisan public freakout over a crazy man saying crazy things is sometimes entertaining, and Trump's nonsense helps us forget the monster hiding under Clinton's own bed:
The FBI.
Her top aides from her time as secretary of state may soon be questioned by FBI agents investigating how top secret and other classified documents came to be kept on her private server. And after they're questioned, it will be her turn.
There's no assurance that her private server wasn't hacked by foreign intelligence. At issue was whether she was merely negligent or willful, and either puts her in real legal and political jeopardy.
And so what she needs is for Democrats to have nightmares about Trump, the better to ignore whether their leading candidate may very well be implicated in a criminal probe. And with so much stress on her, we might as well put Hillary back on the comfy chair in the quiet room:
"Goodnight comb and goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.
"And goodnight to the old lady whispering, 'hush.'"
Clintons are in no position to surf the populist wave
By Jonah Goldberg
Published April 1, 2016
With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, there's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.
Here's Bill Clinton in Spokane, Washington, making the pitch for his wife last week: "But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that ..."
The awful legacy of the last eight years? That'd be a strange thing for any Democrat to say, but it's particularly odd given that Hillary Clinton has made it abundantly clear that she's running for a third Barack Obama term.
Last year, she loved telling voters that she wasn't running as a continuation of Obama. But that was before Bernie Sanders ignited a left-wing populist backlash against the status quo. Unable to get to Sanders' left -- understandable, given that it would require embracing Bolshevism -- Clinton was forced to defend the administration she worked for.
Also, as has been widely reported and dissected, Clinton's strategists concluded months ago that she had no choice but to embrace Obama and his policies, because Obama is popular with precisely the voters Clinton needs in order to assemble a winning coalition. These voters may think the country is on the wrong track, but they don't blame Obama for it.
That's one reason why Team Clinton has charged, sometimes hysterically, that Sanders is somehow attacking the president when he says, for instance, that Obamacare doesn't go far enough. The Clintonistas touted the fact that Sanders blurbed a book by left-wing writer Bill Press critical of Obama as if it were a confession of treason.
But now comes the former president attacking the Obama record head-on. The Spokane speech wasn't a fluke. Bill has also taken to explaining that the real reason this election is so crazy is that 80 percent of the American people haven't gotten a pay raise since the crash."
No doubt he wouldn't put all the blame on Obama, but that's some odd messaging for a campaign looking to run on "four more years."
One obvious explanation is that the Clinton team has come to grips with the fact that the Sanders and Trump insurgencies are two faces of the same larger phenomenon. Huge swaths of the American electorate are fed up, ticked off and wildly disappointed with the direction of their country.
In a society so polarized along ideological lines, it's no surprise that partisans will have partisan explanations for why this is so. But the underlying conditions driving the discontent are in fact bipartisan. Anyone who listened closely to both the tea parties and the Occupy Wall Street crowd could hear the echoes of similar complaints. The incestuous relationship between big business and big government drives both the left and the right crazy.
As a conservative, I think the right-wingers have better remedies for the problem. In a nutshell, big corporations will always have the resources -- financial, political, legal, etc. -- to manipulate and navigate around regulations. Smaller firms simply can't handle the compliance costs of draconian regulations.
The result: Only the really big companies can survive and thrive, which in turn makes them "too big to fail." That's why community banks are being destroyed by Obama's policies: They can't carry the costs the way the big banks can, and, lacking connections and influence, they're small enough to fail.
In other words, if you think Big Business and Big Government are hugging each other too much, the last thing you should do is have government tighten the embrace.
But that's a policy argument for another day. And besides, the underlying problems with the economy are much larger than, and in some cases wholly unrelated to, Wall Street excesses.
But as a political matter, Wall Street is a useful scapegoat. And the Clintons, both darlings of Wall Street who have enriched themselves by exploiting their connections to it, are badly positioned to withstand, never mind exploit, the populist tide. That's why Hillary Clinton can't put Bernie Sanders away. That's why Bill is turning up the heat on the "awful legacy" of the last eight years. And that's another reason Hillary will have a harder time in the fall than people think.
